Innocence Project Can you imagine being sentences to 100 years in prison or even death for a crime that you did not commit? When someone innocent is sentenced to prison, they are left with little hope. As a result of the efforts of the innocence project and DNA testing over 280 people have been exonerated. How do innocent people get wrongly convicted in the first place when we have so many checks and balances to protect the innocent? The most common element in wrongful convictions is eyewitness misidentification.
Mistaken eyewitness identification has been shown to be the most common cause of wrongful conviction, as seen by recent DNA exonerations. According to Wells (et al., 1998) of the first 40 DNA exonerations in the US, 36 had been convicted on the basis of eye witness testimonials. The reliability of eye-witness testimonies are said to effected by certain variables. Wells and Olson (2002) explain that variables effecting eye witness testimonies can be classified as either system variables or estimator variables. System
“Along with Troy Davis hundreds of people have been wrongfully convicted and executed in the United States” (David A. Love 1). Think about it if the person that faced the death penalty wasn’t guilty you took an innocent life. There are just some things that people shouldn’t have the ability to do, and sentencing someone to a death is one of them. “Since 1976-2010 there have been approximately 1,226 executions”.
An eyewitness is an individual who was present during an event and is called by a party in a lawsuit to testify as to what he or she observed. Eyewitnesses cannot be intoxicated or insane at the time of the controverted event occurred will be prevented from testifying, regardless of whether he or she was the only eyewitness to the occurrence. Recent DNA exoneration cases have corroborated the warnings of eyewitness identification researchers by showing that mistaken eyewitness misidentification was the largest single factor contributing to the conviction of these innocent people, especially those who are in death row. There have been many wrongful deaths because of misidentification testimonies and men/women have lost many years in prison due to eyewitnesses misidentifying them. How can the government assure us that they found a better way of sentencing the right people and not making mistakes?
In fact, the death penalty needs to be imposed more often because it prevents the murders of innocent people, and the punishment should fit the crime. Vivacious opponents of the death penalty claim that it is unfair because no one can ever be sure that someone is guilty. One such opponent Barry Scheck started the Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence to prove that convicted criminals
This results in poor representation of convicted people in courts and unfair verdicts. Another issue associated with the penalty is that the value of life is lessened. Government should be concerned with the damage inflicted on society when a person is sentenced to be killed by juries. Being put to death by a people does not seem to be that different from a heinous murder committed by a murderer. With all of the media reporting executions like movies, societies become desensitized and accept death penalty as the right way to take care of criminals.
Intro to Criminology 5/21/13 Innocence Project What is the Innocence Project? The Innocence Project is a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The Innocence Project was founded at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in 1992, and became an independent nonprofit organization (still closely affiliated with Cardozo) in 2004. Since the organization’s founding, 292 people have been exonerated through DNA testing in the United States, including 17 who were at one time sentenced to death. In most of these DNA exonerations, the Innocence Project either was the attorney
Still today you wonder why people would even think of doing this, but you hear people write stories and documentaries about it all the time. People of today don’t really think of murder as anything because they see it so much on T.V, but should it be that way? If one heard somebody was shot, they would not respond very dramatically, if one were to hear that someone was brutally murdered, it almost seems as if the world is falling apart. It’s funny that these two things are so similar, yet so different. That is what these two stories explain.
Criminal Wrong Doings Jennifer Hyler CRJ 201 Ginger Jarvis July 24, 2011 Criminal Wrong Doings The criminal laws control criminal acts and channel human behaviors. Criminal laws also orchestrate punishments and sentences to the ones who commit wrong doings crimes towards someone’s person or personal property. A criminal law assumes that wrong doings not only damage the surrounding people, but society as well. All violators that commit a crime such as murder or rape must be punished. Criminal laws also have two written laws that are split up into two different categories.
But there is one type of evidence that is even more persuasive and that of course is DNA. According to the innocence project there have been more than 235 people exonerated by DNA evidence in this country. And if that is not surprising enough research now shows that three quarters of those convicted were sent to prison at least in part because an eyewitness pointed a